The former president named J.D. Vance, an Ohio senator, as his running mate and vice president if he returns to the White House.
Born in Middletown, Ohio in 1984, Vance comes from a white, working-class family of mostly Scots-Irish descent. He was raised by his maternal grandparents in the once-booming mining region of Appalachia, now one of the poorest areas in the country.
Vance joined the Marines for four years and served in Iraq before attending Ohio State University, where he earned degrees in political science and philosophy.
From there, he attended Yale Law School and then wrote his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which some critics have described as a window into an often-overlooked conservative white working class.
In 2017, Vance returned to Ohio from California, where he had worked in biotechnology, and started his own venture capital firm with the backing of PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a sometime libertarian and a rare Republican in Silicon Valley.
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In early 2021, Thiel donated $10m (£8m) to a committee seeking to recruit Vance as a Senate candidate.
When Vance joined the race, he abruptly changed his tone on Trump, apologising for previously calling him "reprehensible" and even repeating the president's false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election
With Trump's backing, he secured the Senate seat and has since become an influential voice in Washington.
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